Far too often in the theater, actors can’t be heard or bits of business can’t be seen. The best to be said about “The Play That Goes Wrong” at the Ahmanson is that its entire cast can be seen and speaks expertly.

Otherwise, as ironically promised, this play goes wrong. It feels like a high-schooler’s idea of a high-school play that goes wrong, including the self-congratulatory tone.

Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer and Henry Shields take credit for writing it, promising and delivering on a story about a college theater troupe’s disastrous performance of a 1920s-style murder mystery. The writers have squeezed dozens and dozens and dozens of theater-disaster clichés into its two acts.

Ned Noyes and Jamie Ann Romero star in the national tour of The Play That Goes Wrong. (Photo by Jeremy Daniel)

From left, Peyton Crim, Scott Cote, Evan Alexander Smith and Ned Noyes star in the national tour of The Play That Goes Wrong. (Photo by Jeremy Daniel)

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From left, Yaegel T. Welch (on sofa), Peyton Crim and Jamie Ann Romero star in the national tour of The Play That Goes Wrong. (Photo by Jeremy Daniel)

The Play That Goes Wrong plays at the Ahmanson Theatre through Aug. 11. (Photo by Jeremy Daniel)

Undoubtedly, great joy can be found in universal humor. Great joy can be found even in lowest-common-denominator humor. But when every comedic bit is uncharmingly predictable, when the whole evening starts at fever pitch and stays there, when some of the humor seems mean-spirited (particularly as it’s cast here), the whole evening feels like a too-highly-touted Fringe show.

Not that the clockwork staging is faulty. Matt DiCarlo directs, “with original Broadway direction by Mark Bell.” So much of this production is stage business: slapstick, breakage, recalcitrance. And so much of that goes so well.

On the deliberate, scripted side, lights come up too early, doors stick, props get misplaced, swords snap in half, actors get knocked out, scenery plunges, and these amateur performers don’t know how to adeptly cover. Body parts get stepped on and lines of dialogue get stepped on, and it’s never clear which feels worse to the actors involved.

But problematically, the audience has no reason to care about those “college” actors trying to put on a play. None seems to be in it for those right reasons that so many great actors enumerate: keeping the world’s great stories alive, changing our minds on important issues, perhaps prompting us to take action in our lives or the lives of those around us, or just plain entertaining us for a few hours.

No, these “actors” are the worst theater clichés: wanting attention, desperate for escape from their damaging self-doubts, relishing their two hours in fancy costumes. So when they’re flailing, when they’re badly injured, when they’re feeling shame, we’re merely watching chessmen get moved around a board.

The Ahmanson actors are fine, particularly Ned Noyes, who plays audience favorite Max and early on establishes a relationship with the audience. But are we also expected to laugh at the fact that although we’re supposedly watching a college production, the Ahmanson actors are far beyond college age?

We know all will continue to go wrong for two acts. We expect the rule of three (comedic bits coming in threes to wring the maximum laughs out of them). But here each bit get repeated many, many times more.

Granted, a sizeable number of opening-night audience members found all of this funny. But a better bet would be to stay home and watch “Noises Off!” or The Three Stooges or any Austin Powers movie, and save your money for a stage production that’s actually worthy of running in what should be Los Angeles’ premier theater venue.

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